From April 14th, to June 2nd, we present "Refuse/Re-seen" during which we'll focus on individual artists here on our blog. Today, we're pleased to introduce to you: Claire Marcus
My work is created in series with processes including painting, drawing, and photography printed on silk, stitched with found objects. It reflects my background as a fifth generation fiber artist, synthesizing family heritage with training in painting, architecture, and design, often based on landscape studies. I have special interests in the structure of land- and cityscape, and its power to evoke memory and narrative, as well as the interaction of built and natural environment.
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Conquest Series: Norfolk
20" x 16" 2012 |
My Conquest Series addresses narratives between the lines of the 1086 Domesday Book, a record of England’s population and resources twenty years after the Norman Conquest. The ephemeral nature of cultures, possessions, and history is the major theme I find in Domesday. I re-purposed pages from a damaged Domesday Book translation listing the 1086 landowners and stitched them to photographed pages from a discarded atlas that I edited and printed on sheer silk.
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Conquest Series: Essex
20" x 16" 2012 |
New landowners are cited in the Domesday text alongside the names of those they defeated and displaced. We learn much about the buildings, crops, and livestock of the properties, but the previous inhabitants disappear from the record. While we are left to imagine their fates, maps show little Norman impact on English place names. In considering the blending, ebb, and flow of cultures, we remember that churches mentioned here lost their property to Henry VIII’ s Reformation. Later still, British servicemen like my grandfather fought on behalf of French interests in WWI and returned to Normandy as liberators on D-Day in 1944.
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